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New Scientist Live

Weird dream? Your brain won’t even try to make sense of it

By Jessica Hamzelou

YOU open your front door to find your boss – who is also a cat. The bizarre can seem completely normal when you’re dreaming, perhaps because parts of your brain give up trying to figure out what’s going on.

Armando D’Agostino of the University of Milan in Italy decided to investigate the strangeness of dreams. His team asked 12 people to keep diaries in which they were to write detailed accounts of seven dreams. When volunteers could remember one, they were also told to record what they had done that day and come up with an unrelated fantasy story to accompany an image they were given.

Using a “bizarreness” scoring system, the researchers found that dreams were significantly weirder than the waking fantasies the volunteers composed (Journal of Sleep Research, doi.org/3wk). “It seems counterintuitive, but there was almost no bizarreness in fantasies,” says D’Agostino. “There are logical constraints on waking fantasies, and they are never as bizarre as a dream.”

A month later, the reports were read back to each of the dreamers while their brain activity was monitored with an fMRI scanner.

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Both dreams and fantasies seemed to selectively activate a set of structures in the right hemisphere of the brain associated with complex language processing. Curiously, the activity in this area appeared to decrease as the narrative became increasingly bizarre. It is almost as if the brain is giving up trying to make sense of the dream, says D’Agostino.

“It’s a legitimate theory,” says Patrick McNamara at Boston University. He thinks bizarreness may result from the brain’s attempt to symbolise complex emotions as it tries to store memories. “When emotions are intense, they are harder to symbolise, so perhaps the dreams are more likely to be bizarre,” he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Brain gives up making sense of weird dreams”